Chosere

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person who makes a choice or selects someone or something from among several options
2. Someone who picks or decides upon a particular thing, person, or course of action
3. The individual doing the selecting when a choice is made among alternatives

Etymology: The verb underneath this word once leaned toward testing rather than picking. Old English "ceosan" meant "to choose" but also carried a sense of trying or proving something, and the Gothic cognate "kiusan" means "to test." The older idea of choosing was closer to discerning what is genuine, so picking the best option grew out of trying things out. "Chosere" is simply the agent form, built from "chose," the past-tense stem of "choose," plus the suffix "-er," which marks a person who performs the action. Middle English writers used the "-o-" vowel from the past stem, while the spelling "chooser" later settled into modern English. Because the formation is so regular, the word needs no coinage or special history: it is a transparent agent noun from a very old verb.